Toil and trouble
As I stood in the kitchen pantry, listening as John retched – yes, retched – upstairs into the toilet I would not even sit on, I thought I should go offer some head-holding or hand-wringing, but I could not. It’s not that I wasn’t properly attired for barf patrol. In addition to my “uniform” (old, ripped clothing; gym shoes; a Bud watchcap), I was wearing a double layer of protective gloves (surgical underneath Playtex) and a mask. (John won the flip and got the respirator; he was, after all, ripping up the wall-to-wall, stained shag – yes, shag – carpet in the bathroom.) And it wasn’t that I didn’t care. After all, this was my beloved, my “in sickness and in heath” mate (although, to be frank, when I made those vows I was thinking more of being on the receiving end of the bedpan change than the giving).
No, as my husband hurled, I offered neither balm nor solace. Instead, I gripped the edge of the counter like those aboard a tempest-tossed ship cling to the rail. Because, for the same reason victims of seasickness cannot go to the aid of one other, I knew if I were to release my hold and venture upstairs, I would soon join the retching. This was not mal de mer. It was mal de maison.
We had only been homeowners for two days, and our mettle was already being seriously tested. Earlier in the week, I had voted in some stupid special election and – after making much fanfare about that being my last vote cast on Munjoy Hill – slipped on the concrete steps on my way out of the Cummings Center, landing smack on my back. Fortunately, I was wearing my big leather bike jacket, which padded the fall some, but not enough to keep me from hobbling. And then, after we had spent our first day in our home ripping up crappy carpets, I came back to our apartment to find Little Car was dead. Not kind-of dead, mind you, but tow-it-to-the-shop, your-starter’s-blown dead. Plus, we had the brilliant idea of eating takeout Thai food that night, and both of us woke up with the assuredness that something was brewing in our systems, and it wasn’t green tea. With all this in mind, I was already on fairly shaky ground; going to John’s aid at that moment was simply out of the question.
Instead, I decided to focus on my task: clean this should-be-white porcelain sink that was stained brown from – so I thought – use. This is a good brown stain, I tried to tell myself – as though there could be such a thing on God’s green earth.Years of cheerful pots of coffee and neighborly cups of tea. Mugs of winter cocoa. That’s all we have here: a house’s history of hot drinks. And perhaps I could have gone on deluding myself as such, had it not been for the light sifting of Ajax that spilled from the can I was holding aloft. Because what happened when the powder hit a rivulet in the sink galled me. I stood in utter disbelief as the trickle wended its way down the drain, leaving behind in its slug trail glistening white porcelain.
OK, Ajax contains chemicals (and, yes, I would prefer to clean Green, but this sink was enough to make even Jonathan Carter reach for some mercury/DDT/bleach-laced industrial cleaner), but you still have to do your part. You still have to scrub to remove a stain. Because this is a stain, right? A nice, brown, hot-drink stain.
I ran a little more water and then, bracing myself, sprinkled more of the powder. I gagged. The brown ran down the drain like a coat of muck from the bottom of the old Mississippi. This was not a stain in my sink. This was kaka. Fresh kaka. Someone else’s kaka.
“What kind of people live like this?” I bellowed, not for the last time, as I stormed through the house, past the front door and Glinda the Stink Bomb – the mysterious orb of smell that seemed to follow me around. I was about to continue my rant when I crested the stairs and took one look at John. The retching was done, but so was the damage. He was living evidence of what the expression “through the wringer” means. He looked flat and white and worn as an old washrag. The lightest dusting of Ajax could’ve done him in.
Despite the fact we had but two days before the floor guys arrived, there was nothing to do but take John home and put him to bed. He had managed to uproot most all of the distgusto carpet from the bathroom (exposing some lovely, cracked asbestos tile flooring), so I could get on without him. And I can’t say that I really knocked myself out with toil, especially since this was the day members of our families came to see for the first time the house it had taken us all our lives to buy. I wanted to apologize or explain why we had bought such a stupid, filthy, loser house, but they didn’t appear to see the brown gack or the carpet or the tile. They saw the house we had fallen in love with, and they loved it, too.
At dusk, I went down to the basement to retrieve something without bothering to turn the lights on. Dim sun spilled in from the windows – enough to see, but also enough to create plenty of creepy corners. And suddenly I had a moment. And that moment was a feeling of comfort, comfort standing in a strange basement at dusk in a house with no phone and a husband conked out halfway across town by Shag-Thai fever. After all the basements I had looked at that made my blood run cold in our endless house search, I had selected one that comforted.
When I finally made my way back to our apartment that night, I fed John a piece of toast, drank two beers and ate some cheese and crackers. After a hot bath and a couple of Advil to stop my back from barking, I crawled into bed and took my love’s hand in mine.
And that was how we spent our first Valentine’s Day in our new home.
For better or for worse, Elizabeth Peavey’s column appears here biweekly.
